Back More
Salem Press

Table of Contents

Encyclopedia of American Immigration, 2nd Edition

Rothko, Mark

by Wendy Wentworth

Identification: Russian-born American painter remembered as a key figure in the development of abstract expressionism

Significance: Mark Rothko was one of the principal exponents of abstract expressionism, an important movement in American painting in the period following World War II. Rothko’s style, which changed relatively little over his career, singled him out as unique among his fellow abstract expressionists (such as Willem De Kooning, Franz Kline, Adolph Gottlieb, and Helen Frankenthaler). The classic reticence of his simple but monumental rectangles of glowing and shifting color distinguished his outsized canvases from the more turbulent and furious “action painters” of the era.

Mark Rothko was born Marcus Rothkovich in 1903 in Dvinsk, Russia. His father was a Russian Jewish pharmacist who in 1913 brought his family to the United States. They settled in Portland, Oregon, where the young Rothko attended public elementary and secondary schools. Rothko entered Yale College in 1921, but because of a lack of interest in formal learning, he left in 1923. By 1925 he had settled in New York City, where he began to attend Max Weber’s classes at the Art Students League.

He first exhibited in 1929. In the early 1930s his work was included in group shows at the Secession Gallery. His first solo exhibitions occurred in 1933 at the Contemporary Arts Gallery in New York City and at the Portland (Oregon) Art Museum. Like so many other American artists trying to weather the Depression, he worked as part of the Federal Arts Project in New York in 1936-1937, creating realist works.

In the 1940s Rothko briefly flirted with surrealism, mounting a one-person show at Peggy Guggenheim’s gallery in 1945. By 1947, however, his style had become completely abstract, characterized by floating and diffuse rectangles of color. At the Betty Parsons Gallery, his work garnered the attention of critics but received mixed reviews.

In 1951, Rothko showed at the Museum of Modern Art in an exhibition called “Abstract Painting and Sculpture in America.” After that, he was often represented in Museum of Modern Art exhibitions. His work also appeared in solo shows in several major cities outside New York. Avant-garde critics acclaimed Rothko, but the more conservative critics voiced their alarm at the increasing size and emptiness of his canvases.

Rothko’s importance in American painting was signaled by a retrospective showing of fifty-four of his works at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City in early 1961. Such recognition was then rarely accorded a living painter—much less an American—by an institution that some considered (and still consider) the final arbiter in questions of taste in contemporary art.

Over the course of his career, Rothko produced paintings that became larger, simpler, more majestic in their emptiness; into that emptiness the viewer could project whatever meanings—or moods—he or she wishes. In an early statement, Rothko (with Adolph Gottlieb) described his approach: “We favor the simple expression of the complex thought. We are for the large shape because it has the impact of the unequivocal. We wish to reassert the picture plane. We are for flat forms because they destroy illusion and reveal truth.” Some critics felt that Rothko’s style represented an appalling emptiness; others found that his compositions, by eliminating all superfluous detail, symbolized the calm orderliness of another world.

From 1925, Rothko made New York City his home. He left it only occasionally—to travel to Europe and to take temporary teaching positions elsewhere in the United States. In 1968, he was diagnosed with a mild aneurysm, yet he continued to drink and smoke. He died, a suicide, in New York in 1970.

Further Reading

1 

Ashton, Dore. About Rothko. New York: Oxford University Press, 1983.

2 

Breslin, James E.B. Mark Rothko: A Biography. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993.

3 

Cohen-Solal, Annie. Mark Rothko: Toward the Light in the Chapel. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015.

4 

Rothko, Christopher. Mark Rothko: From the Inside Out. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015.

5 

Rothko, Mark. Writings on Art. Miguel Lypez-Remiro, ed. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006.

6 

Seldes, Lee. The Legacy of Mark Rothko. New York: Penguin Books, 1979.

Citation Types

Type
Format
MLA 9th
Wentworth, Wendy. "Rothko, Mark." Encyclopedia of American Immigration, 2nd Edition, edited by Michael Shally-Jensen, Salem Press, 2021. Salem Online, online.salempress.com/articleDetails.do?articleName=AmImm2e_0495.
APA 7th
Wentworth, W. (2021). Rothko, Mark. In M. Shally-Jensen (Ed.), Encyclopedia of American Immigration, 2nd Edition. Salem Press. online.salempress.com.
CMOS 17th
Wentworth, Wendy. "Rothko, Mark." Edited by Michael Shally-Jensen. Encyclopedia of American Immigration, 2nd Edition. Hackensack: Salem Press, 2021. Accessed October 22, 2025. online.salempress.com.